Look What Happened To The Neighborhood

April 23, 1997|By David Broder. Washington Post Writers Group.

It appears that the several thousand reporters who descended on last summer's Democratic National Convention at the United Center--me, among them--missed a big story that was right under our noses. And it wasn't the Dick Morris resignation.

The story we missed was that all around the United Center are signs of revival in a once-blighted slum neighborhood--freshly painted houses, a new park and library, start-up small businesses. And if a joint report to be issued April 24 in Washington by the Center for National Policy and the Local Initiatives Support Coalition can be believed, similar locally led neighborhood renewal efforts are beginning to halt the downward cycle in many cities and offer hope of a brighter future for their residents.

The draft of "Life in the City" that I read before my visit here said that "non-profit community groups formed by churches, civic associations and ordinary residents, working with government and the private sector . . . have produced hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, and some have invested in commercial enterprises or are involved in anti-crime, child care, job training, health care and other activities."

The picture drawn in this report and exemplified by what I saw here contradicts the general notion that all the old city neighborhoods are trapped in a downward spiral of crime, drugs and joblessness. "While certain neighborhoods within the cities remain disaster areas," the report says, "increasingly effective local organizations are succeeding where earlier attempts failed and are bringing devastated areas back to life."

I saw evidence of exactly that when I spent a day driving through Chicago, the city of my youth, with Andrew J. Mooney, the program director for LISC Chicago. LISC and its affiliated National Equity Fund are the financial lifeline for many of these efforts. Nationally, it has raised over $2.5 billion from foundations and businesses and it puts over $100 million a year of loans and grants into locally led initiatives that are changing neighborhoods from the South Bronx to San Diego.

The folks who are spearheading these efforts are inspirational. In the blighted Washington Park area west of the University of Chicago, the Rev. Richard L. Tolliver has made St. Edmund's Episcopal Church a catalyst for neighborhood revival since he arrived seven years ago. With a mixture of federal and city grants, low-income housing tax credits and help from LISC and other donors, he has residents pursuing what he calls a "holistic" strategy for dealing with housing, education and security deficits.

Tolliver can report progress on all fronts: 67 units of rehabbed housing completed, another $13 million of new construction and renovations under way; an independent, non-parochial school with four classes launched in the church building, with plans to add a grade a year; 14 block-watch clubs that meet monthly and, with a big boost from beat-walking community police, a 15 percent drop in the crime rate.

Farther north, in the Pilsen area, the Resurrection Project, a coalition of neighborhood churches, has taken St. Vitus Church, a gift from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, which could no longer maintain it, and has made it a day-care and social-service center, with the sanctuary serving as home for art, theater and ballet classes. Susana Vasquez, who joined the staff a year ago, proudly tells a visitor that 77 buildings with 100 units of housing have been rehabilitated, many of them by a construction company launched by the Resurrection Project, which has created 58 jobs for local residents.

But maybe the most dramatic change is just beyond the United Center parking lots west of downtown, where Ernest Gates, a self-employed trucker and part-time head of the Near West Side Community Development Corporation, mobilized his neighbors and stared down both city officials and Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago Bulls, to insist that construction of the new arena should be the spark to revive the area--not weaken its already fragile underpinnings.

Pointing to the new town houses and apartment buildings, the new health center and drug store, Gates says, "The change has been light-years. You'll see no graffiti in this neighborhood now. The community has a sense of ownership. The gangs help police the area. When equipment was stolen from the field house, they saw that it was returned and they put the culprits on a work detail in the park themselves."

As Gates is the first to acknowledge, there is a long way to go before all the residents of the public housing project in the midst of the neighborhood "can break the cycle of dependency and be integrated into the broader society." But so much has happened already, he says, "we're entitled to hope."